Karel Rogers, PhD – Urgency (2009.10.02)

Video Transcript:

There’s a sense of urgency about this because we’re starting 30 some years too late, and since the early 70’s, we’ve invested billions of dollars in energy inefficient buildings, community design and vehicles, like the Hummer and things like that. And by investing over and over again in this inefficient stuff, what we’re literally doing is expecting to play in an international marketplace with energy inefficient methods where our fellow world travelers in Europe and China and so on have more of a concept of how much value there is on energy. When you pit an energy inefficient product against an energy efficient product and that energy is bought in an international marketplace, someone has to subsidize that difference, which is what we’ve been getting our government to do. Well, our government isn’t real solvent right now, so that can’t work for the long term. The only solution, really, is that we get, you know, our abilities, our innovative ability, the power of our economy and start turning it toward becoming extremely energy efficient and become good competitors on the world market.

A second reason that there’s a real sense of urgency now, is that the earth simply cannot withstand the kind of abuse that we’ve been giving it, and the earth has a way of kicking back at any organism that is not treating, you know, the earth as it needs to be. We can’t tear apart earth’s life support systems and expect our lives to be supported.